Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis emerges from Lake Balaton after 5.2-kilometer swim in August; she was in the top third of 4,500 participants

Photo: Attila Nemeth, Special To The Chronicle

Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis emerges from Lake Balaton after...

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Ambassador Eleni Tsakapoulos Kounalakis and her husband, Markos Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, decked out in rocker clothes, attend the opening of Kogart House exhibition, "From San Francisco to Woodstock, The Golden Age of American Rock Posters 1965 - 1971"

In her Budapest office in late September, an American flag behind her and a soft photograph of Hillary Rodham Clinton on the hearth, U.S. Ambassador to Hungary Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis thinks back to San Francisco two years ago, when she was considering a list of four countries she'd been offered by the White House.

"Budapest, yes!" said her husband, Markos Kounalakis, and the decision was made, instantly, at the 7th hole of the Presidio Golf Course, where they were playing.

The prospective nominee had never been to Hungary, but her husband had spent time there as a Newsweek correspondent covering Central Europe in the late '80s. What had impressed him then, she says, sitting in her sunny office in the Budapest Embassy, was that Hungary was a country with citizens "pushing up against the powers."

Encouraging that pushing - everyday people working for change in their governments and their communities - is a large part of U.S. policy worldwide. Exercising democracy by banding together to advocate for causes, speaking out and questioning authority are the essence of "civil society," a term used often by Secretary of State Clinton to describe the mission of U.S. ambassadors around the world. It is mentioned almost every time Kounalakis speaks.

A young democracy

The common wisdom, says the ambassador, is that "Hungary is an old country with a young democracy. The United States is a young country with an old democracy. We have a lot we can continue to bring to the table. ... It's all about what's happening here in Central Europe, where the U.S. still has a lot of work to do, and can make a difference."

April Foley, ambassador to Hungary during the George W. Bush administration, says the job requires "the hard work and tenacity of a football player and the sensitivity of a poet." Kounalakis "has proven herself to be a highly capable and dedicated diplomat," especially by managing "to balance disparate interests with elegance and grace."

Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis was 43 in fall 2009 when the White House announced that the "Northern California businesswoman, civic leader and philanthropist" had been nominated to the post, a medium-size embassy with 400 staffers.

"It was really clear the president wanted young energetic ambassadors," she says. She was in a corps of Obama-appointed diplomats that included Matthew Barzun, ambassador to Sweden and 39 when nominated, and Jeff Bleich, who was 48 when nominated as ambassador to Australia.

"We represent that younger demographic. In Central Europe, there are a lot of young people in government," she says, noting that Hungary's current leader, Victor Orbán, was in his 30s when he became prime minister 10 years ago.

Involved in politics

Kounalakis had been involved in national and local politics for years, as a contributor to Democratic candidates and as a four-time delegate to Democratic national conventions. She'd been living at 2500 Steiner St., the apartment house that is the go-to San Francisco destination for Democratic fundraising, and, as leader of Greek Americans for Clinton, had raised more than $1 million for Hillary Clinton's campaign. When Clinton abandoned her campaign, Kounalakis and her family threw their support to Barack Obama.

She's in the habit of thinking before she speaks, and then speaking with power and precision. She acknowledges readily, for example, that she is among the 1 in 4 ambassadors is a political appointee - the others are career diplomats - and that labeled a "land developer" she could have been "easily dismissed as the daughter of somebody."

As the president of AKT Development, founded by her father, Angelo Tsakopoulos, Kounalakis dealt with real estate, farming, ranching and water. Tsakopoulos, 75, came to the United States from Greece after World War II. He worked in jobs that included stints as a field worker and as a waiter in the governor's mansion in Sacramento before attending Sacramento State College, as the university was known then, and building one of the biggest land development corporations in California. Inspired by Cesar Chavez, he has always been a major supporter of Democratic candidates, as are his offspring.

There were six children, but it was this daughter, graduate of Dartmouth and holder of an MBA from UC Berkeley, whom he made president of AKT. "My father runs the company," she says, "and he has always run the company. But he used to say that I was his best general. ... It's only because I had him as a mentor that I could develop the skills for this (ambassador) job."

Kounalakis' public credentials were major - former member of the California State World Trade Commission; Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce board member; activist in the World Conference of Religions for Peace; and trustee of the San Francisco War Memorial and the Sundance Preserve - but she says being backed by those senators, "these incredibly supportive women," was essential. "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for their support."

News accounts called her confirmation "a breeze."

Literature vs. language

In preparing for the job, Kounalakis decided not to attempt to learn Hungarian, a difficult language. "The embassy staff is replete with trained foreign service experts who speak Hungarian. I felt that I would be far better off reading Hungarian literature," to put "meat on the bones of history" and provide insights into a country that she says was ground zero for the 20th century's most serious crises: World War I, World War II and the Cold War.

In keeping with Secretary of State Clinton's "civil society" concept, Kounalakis was looking forward to an October visit from Christine Pelosi, who would be conducting "boot camps for democracy." Pelosi, daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and an independent political strategist, conducts the training sessions all over the world to teach aspiring politicians and grassroots activists how to achieve goals as broad as protecting civil liberties and as narrow as putting up stop signs.

Local issues, of course, are to be sidestepped by diplomats, whose job is to represent the views of their country, not their own. Does this ever cause personal conflict for Kounalakis?

Sometimes, she acknowledges, as in the case of the Budapest gay pride parade. In San Francisco, she raised her children "in an environment where I'm explaining to them from a young age that people are born with different sexual orientations and that's normal. ... When I thought of the gay pride parade, I thought, well, of course I'm going to go to that, I always go."

In Budapest, however, the parade has "more a feeling of protest than a celebration," and local police asked ambassadors not to march. "They said there was enough of a security challenge that our being there only complicates it. ... I had to respect that it was the case."

But because "promoting tolerance is the policy" of the government abroad, and it's her role to interpret how to implement that, she decided that the United States should sponsor the parade. As a result, the organizers have used the great seal of the United States on literature for the past two years.

She does speak at pride events, where, she says, "You look at the faces, and you can see that they are struggling." She wants to tell them: "If you feel that you just can't take it anymore, come to San Francisco."

The family

Eleni Tsakopoulos met Markos Kounalakis, also a child of Greek immigrants, at dinner 11 years ago. He was a UC Berkeley graduate with a master's from Columbia, a former foreign correspondent, multilingual veteran of Newsweek, NBC radio and Mutual News Moscow. They married eight weeks after they met.

Markos Kounalakis is president and publisher of the Washington Monthly, though he's not serving in those positions while his wife is ambassador. In Budapest, he is on the faculty of Central European University, founded by Hungarian American entrepreneur and financier George Soros.

The Kounalakises have two sons, Neo, 10, and Eon, 9, who attend American International School of Budapest, where only 20 percent of their classmates come from English-speaking households. It's a busy household, as it was in California, where the family had homes in San Francisco and near Sacramento. (They have a house in Greece, too.) Having hired help is "not a big change."

Because of demands on the ambassador's time, some traditional roles for embassy spouses have shifted. When then-CIA chief Leon Panetta visited, a sit-down dinner for 30 was planned. During cocktail hour, he asked her what they were serving. "I said I had no idea. ... Markos is not enthralled with the idea of approving menus. ... It's usually the wife that would do that. But since I'm working, I can't fill that role in that way. It really comes to delegation and not getting mad when they serve carpaccio with beef tongue.

A budding barber

"It's become Markos and his boys," a triad that works, but "that doesn't mean that things always get done the way I like." When it was difficult to find a barber shop they liked in Budapest, her husband bought a hair-cutting device and gave one of the boys a Mohawk, which lasted until the ambassador saw it.

What does she miss most? "We really miss our friends and family. The fact that so many are rolling through is our lifeline. Our guests have made it possible to be away for so long." She mentions visits from software innovator Steve Silberstein and portrait painter Carina Ryan, novelist Ayelet Waldman, filmmaker Hilary Armstrong, high-tech CEO Bruce Armstrong, and fellow Democratic pillar Susie Buell, a close pal and Steiner Street neighbor who gave her the artful Hillary Clinton portrait - by French photographer Brigitte Lacombe - that hangs over her office hearth.

Buell's visit coincided with the unveiling of a larger-than-life statue of Ronald Reagan - on the occasion of his 100th birthday - just outside the embassy. "We were worried about the big dinner, which would include staunch Democrat Buell, Peggy Noonan, Ed Meese and Pete and Gayle Wilson," said the ambassador. But there were no fireworks. "We kept our eye on Susie," says the ambassador, but the guest proved to be a diplomat, too.

Reagan a hero

Setting personal politics aside, the ambassador finds it "humbling" to realize "how much the Hungarian people venerate Ronald Reagan and his role in bringing about the end of the Soviet Union. You can't turn your back on that, and it is my role to celebrate."

A little more than halfway through her term, Kounalakis is aware of the approaching campaign, but mindful that "we have a job to do here, to implement U.S. foreign policy ... spending every single day advancing our goals," engaging Hungarians at every level, and encouraging them to speak out. Even a rock 'n' roll event in Budapest is an opportunity to do that.

When the exhibition, "From San Francisco to Woodstock: The Golden Age of American Rock Posters, 1965 to 1971," opened in Budapest on Sept. 23, Eleni and Markos Tsakopoulos Kounalakis (they often share names) showed up dressed to celebrate the counterculture. She's wearing loopy silver earrings and dark magenta bell-bottoms; he's in close-fitting jeans, a black shirt and a pin-striped jacket. Historically, in these parts of Europe, there's been discrimination against those of differing origins. In welcoming remarks, the ambassador stresses that she is a patriotic American of proud Greek descent, noting that the word "psychedelic" is Greek, "a colorful alteration of the senses."

The art represents an exploration of that alteration, she says, but it also shows "an important part of American history," an era when values were challenged. "In the United States and in Hungary, we shared in the messages of the music, in the desire to question authority and to change the status quo. It was soft power at work. It's the job of citizens to question government and policies all the time."

Earlier that afternoon, Markos Kounalakis and András Simonyi, former ambassador to the United States and curator of the exhibition, gave a talk together on "How Rock and Roll Saved the World" for TEDx - independently organized online presentations under the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) umbrella.

The ambassador says the most important image on the wall of her office is a painting of a hero who symbolizes "the best of Hungarians and the best of Americans." Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty was imprisoned in 1944 for criticizing the fascist Arrow Cross government, freed, then imprisoned for criticizing the Communists, then freed during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he spoke out again. When the Soviets started to attack, he fled to the American Embassy, where he was allowed to live for the next 15 years.

Kounalakis' "best of" refers to the heart of her mission in Budapest, encouraging the person who dares to speak up.